More Than Just a Keeper

The Okapi Who Chose Me

Photo of Bambesa and her calf, Safarani, appears courtesy of Michael Cabello

There is a very silent, very reclusive cousin to the giraffe living in the deep forests of Africa. Often called Forest Giraffes, okapis make their home in the Ituri Forest of The Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly known as Zaire. In fact, they are so reclusive that they were not even discovered by the Western world until 1901 by Sir Harry Johnson, hence their scientific name okapia johnstoni. They have gorgeous maroon colored coats with zebra stripes on their forelegs and rump, and if you pay attention, you will see that the males have skin covered horns just like their giraffe cousins.

Okapis also have the same long prehensile tongues as giraffes that they can use to strip the leaves off of plants. That same tongue is long, and can be used to clean out their own noses, ears and eyes. Weird and gross, but also cool. As a former okapi keeper, I will warn you that they are frighteningly accurate with those long tongues and are not averse to using them to explore your eyes and ears and mouth once they become comfortable with you. But this kind of friendly and curious behavior from them takes often a long time. They are quite shy and not easily befriended, which is probably why I fell so hard for them.

I was closest with Bambesa, who didn’t like many humans at all, but for some reason, she grew to trust me. Though it did take almost a year to develop that trust until she would actually allow me close enough to touch her. My first day caring for her, I blundered and she decided I was suspect for a long time after. It was first thing in the morning and I was shadowing Angela, their regular keeper to learn the ropes. It’s the time of day when the staff takes pee samples from every individual okapi who will cooperate as part of a research project to track changes in hormones and sex pheromones. How do you collect a pee sample from an okapi, who is the size of a horse? Well, you first offer them a little taste of their most favorite foods in the whole wide world. In their case, it was oatmeal with various fruits and veggies mixed into a gruel, and best of all sometimes topped with raw onions. I have never known an opaki to turn down a raw onion. Those things are delicious.

Once the animals were enjoying their treats on their raised feeding shelves, the staff could slowly push a long bamboo pole out from the door without entering the stall too far. The pole had plastic cups affixed to them. (A never ending project. One stick breaks and another must be created.) Anyway, if the animals stood still for us and if they gave a passable attempt to pee in the cup, even if they could not actually go, they were given more gruel. If they refused to come up and stand still, they skipped that treat for the day. They were definitely smart enough to know that we wanted them to hold on to their morning pee until a sample could be taken and if they did this, they would be rewarded.

So imagine on your first day, having just met these people, Angela thrusts one of these twelve foot poles at you and instructs you to quick to stick it under Bambesa, who was already jumping the gun and starting to pee. I moved too quickly to get her sample, and she jumped away from me before walking outside while still peeing as if to say, “I can’t even with you right now.”

Angela apologized for not telling me to go slower, but she had her hands full trying to rush around to all thirteen stalls and collect samples from everyone almost at once. She hadn’t focused on Bambesa that morning, because it turned out she was notorious for refusing any kind of interaction with humans including cooperating with them. When she had started to trickle pee, Angela had wanted to get their first sample in a week, but I mucked it up.